Remarks delivered at a Manhattan Institute luncheon, March 28, 2012 in New York City. Professor Johnson and attorney Harvey Silverglate, whose talk will be presented here tomorrow, spoke on “Kangaroo Courts: Yale, Duke and Student Rights.”
***
Before the Patrick Witt case, I had some experience writing about how the New York Times handles cases of sexual assault allegations against high-profile college athletes–the Duke lacrosse case. After all that damage had been done, and after more than a hundred articles had been published in the New York Times, two Times editors, including Bill Keller, issued some half-hearted apologies for how the paper had mishandled the case, and “mishandled” is a generous word for what the Times did.
I had always worked under the assumption that when an institution
apologizes, it also takes steps to ensure that it doesn’t commit the
same kinds of mistakes again. But the Times obviously has a different
standard of apology than I do. And in the Patrick Witt case, the same
sorts of mistakes were made in coverage — a presumption of guilt when
the allegation is sexual assault, and a decision to ignore critical
procedural issue — because they don’t fit the preconceived storylines.
For those of you who aren’t familiar with the details, a one-minute summary. Witt was a quarterback, and a very good one, at Yale. He was also a finalist for the Rhodes Scholarship. It turned out that his interview for the Rhodes coincided with the day of the Harvard-Yale game. After some thought, he decided to withdraw his Rhodes candidacy and play in the game, which, alas, Yale lost. But it was a kind of feel-good story of a high-profile college athlete putting his team’s needs ahead of his own. And then for more than two months, the world forgot about Patrick Witt, as it should have, until the Times and a reporter, Richard Perez-Pena, swooped in with a nearly 2,000-word article splashed over the front page of the Times sports section detailing that the Rhodes fellowship had suspended Witt’s candidacy, because it had learned that he had faced an allegation of sexual assault.
The story left everything else to insinuation, but any reader would have come away with the following conclusions: One, that Yale and Witt had conspired together to present a false explanation of why he had chosen to withdraw. Secondly, that Witt was something of a habitual criminal. And thirdly, that he likely had done it. Nearly one-tenth of the article was devoted to two extraneous and minor alcohol-related arrests of Witt, the inclusion of which in the piece seemed to have the sole purpose of smearing his character. This story received a good deal of public criticism, including from me. And in response, the Times sort of doubled down on the story–exactly what they did in the Duke lacrosse case. They did not reassign Perez-Pena, as they had not reassigned Duff Wilson, their lead reporter in the lacrosse case. But they did authorize the public editor, Arthur Brisbane, to do his own reporting. This is a very odd journalistic strategy: a public editor doing reporting that the paper’s own reporter had chosen not to do.
The Times’ last line of defense was that this wasn’t an attempt to smear Witt’s character. It was merely an attempt to expose that he had misled his reasons for withdrawal. Even by those standards, the Times story almost certainly was inaccurate, and it definitely was unproven. The public editor conceded, in paragraph 24 of a 26-paragraph piece, that the original article never should have been published. The best reporting on the case was actually done not by the Times but by the Yale Daily News. And the best analysis of the case was done not by the Times, but by the sports website, Deadspin. And both showed that Witt likely withdrew for the exact reasons that he said, that he wanted to play in The Game, and he felt an obligation to his team.
In its attempt to smear Witt and his reputation, the Times actually missed two very significant stories from the Witt affair. The first was that there was one unequivocally true piece of information in the Perez-Pena article, and that is that the Rhodes Fellowship did suspend Witt’s candidacy on the basis of the sexual assault allegation. It was a suspension pending additional action by Yale. Yale had to reauthorize the candidacy, and for reasons I’ll talk about in a second, it’s likely Yale would have reauthorized the candidacy. And so the question is, was the Rhodes Fellowship justified in that action?
A reader of the Times would have assumed that Witt had faced a sexual assault allegation as we understand sexual assault allegations. In fact, Witt faced no such allegation. He faced an internal allegation at Yale. Any of you who have read Harvey Silverglate’s and Alan Charles Kors’s book, “The Shadow University,” or who spend less than two minutes perusing the F.I.R.E. website, will quickly conclude that college disciplinary processes are wildly tilted to minimize the due process rights of accused students. But Yale, in late 2010, decided that its sexual assault procedures were not sufficiently tilted in favor of the accuser. And so they set up a separate, informal complaint procedure for sexual assault. And it is this procedure to which Witt was subjected. Under this procedure, an accuser can file an allegation of sexual assault against a fellow classmate if he or she determines that that classmate has caused him or her to worry. Generally, worrying does not rise to the level of sexual assault. Once this procedure is initiated, and this is a direct quote from the Yale guidelines, “the goal is to achieve a resolution that is desired by the [accuser].” Generally, we do not have processes in which the goal is to benefit the accuser, and this procedure is designed to give the accuser choice of and control over the process.
In blunt language, this means that the accused student, Witt in this case, does not have the right within the Yale procedure to cross-examine his accuser. He does not even have the right to present evidence of his innocence. The accusation is accepted at face value, and the purpose of the process is to resolve it in a way that the accusing student feels comfortable. It is on the basis of this sort of complaint, filed under this procedure, that the Rhodes Fellowship decided that it needed to suspend Witt’s candidacy. That’s nothing short of extraordinary.
The second story that the Times missed, that the Witt case exposed, is that by Yale’s own figures, Yale is actually a hotbed of violent crime. Who knew? In the calendar year 2011, there were 13 allegations of sexual assault at Yale, according to Yale’s figures. All 13 were filed under this informal complaint process, which means that the accuser never went to police, never received any sort of medical exam, and the accused student never had a right to cross-examine or to present evidence of innocence. To give a sense of how out of whack these figures are, if you accept Yale’s standards, on a per capita basis there was more likely to be a sexual assault on the Yale campus, by a factor of between ten and twelve, than in the city of New Haven. And New Haven isn’t just any city. According to the FBI, it’s the fourth most dangerous city in the country for populations over 100,000. So the Times had one of two stories. Either one of our nation’s leading institutions is so dangerous that it’s infinitely more crime-ridden than one of the most dangerous cities in the country, or in fact, one of our leading universities is dumbing down sexual assault. It is, in fact, the latter. In a footnote in a lengthy report on this new process, issued by the Yale Deputy Provost, Yale conceded that the university uses, and this is a direct quote, “a more expansive definition of sexual assault than is commonly understood.” Indeed, claiming that a “worry” constitutes sexual assault is expansive indeed. And so what a university has done is to take a commonly understood phrase, sexual assault under the law–a phrase that’s also basically commonly understood in the general public–and defined it in a way that no one would understand or recognize. That is the real story of the Patrick Witt case.
A final point on Witt. Within this Yale informal complaint process, there is one possible procedural protection that is granted to the accused student, and that is that the process is supposed to be wholly confidential. So the accused student cannot present evidence of his innocence. He can’t cross-examine the accuser. He is presumed guilty. But at least he has the benefit of knowing that it won’t become public, or at least it won’t become public immediately. In Yale’s case, and in the case of Witt, even that one incredibly minor procedural protection was violated. And not only was it violated, it was violated with a malevolent intent. Whoever leaked this information to the Rhodes Trust, and it’s a very discrete number of people who could have leaked this (either someone associated with the accuser, or I would say more likely, someone within the Yale administration), the goal was to sink Witt’s Rhodes candidacy. And that leakage in turn led to the coverage in the Times and the permanent smearing of Witt’s reputation. This morning, before I came over, I did a Google search, Patrick Witt, sexual assault, it yielded 33,600 hits. This is what Witt is now remembered for. There is absolutely no evidence that Yale is investigating this breach of its procedures, I emailed the Yale University spokesperson to ask if an investigation was occurring. He declined to respond. And there is no indication that at any point in the future Yale is going to investigate this breach of procedures. Indeed, it seems as if the university is not terribly concerned with assault if the issue is assault of privacy against one of its students. And that is the story of Patrick Witt.
The answer to this is simple – avoid going to Yale. Who needs it? If an institution acts this poorly in regard to its students then why go there?
The other solution is more ironic – have colleges go back to the male female segregation that was thrown aay in the 1960’s. Let Yale be all male. Vassar can go back to being the girl’s..er…women’s school.
Somehow these ironies are beyond the liberal’s comprehension – but really, a Yale education is worthless.
Find another school!
Welcome to the alternate reality in which Conservatives CARE about the rights of accused people.
Of all the anecdotes contradicting the notion that Conservatives care about the rights of the accused,
Tulia Texas, where over 100 men were FRAMED, by undercover cop Tom Coleman, who was named “Lawman of the Year” by district attorney John Cornyn.
John Cornyn, who is the current Senate Minority Whip for the 113th Congress – for the Republicans.
John Cornyn, a Republican Senator from Texas who “served” 7 years on the Texas supreme court and was even considered for the US supreme court!!!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Cornyn
Folks, this is just one anecdote, but why must I prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Conservatives never cared about the rights of the accused! Everyone knows it because you are the ones who don’t want to give trials to accused terrorists. Everyone knows it because you’re the ones always saying “he must’ve done something” and “the guy who accused him wouldn’t of made it up”.
I just read this by chance and I know my comment is way past being current but I can’t help noting the insanity of this comment. Some cop A is crooked and gets an honor he doesn’t deserve from official B. There’s no evidence B knew about the crookedness but he is GUILTY by association and should be stoned. And this justifies framing other guys not associated in any way with A or B as also GUILTY. And they should all be stoned to death. True feminazi–a term I once thought over the top till I started hearing about feminists who think like this. By her logic, all the world who disagree with her should be stoned. Or, if we want to be charitable, because there is an injustice somewhere, she is justified with committing all the injustices she can conceive. Never mind that the crooked cop was exposed and punished by the system she thinks is unjust. She wants all that right to defense/evidence/right to face your accuser/non-Star chamber stuff thrown out for people she hates because sometime, somewhere, some guy stepped on her toe and didn’t cut off his foot to apologize. She is a hateful, monster and doesn’t deserve to live in a free society. Unfortunately, she and her ilk are taking care of that by destroying our free society.
I do not think that the author blamed liberals or feminists for the policies over at Yale university. A lot of liberals and feminists would probably consider policies like this crap at Yale to be authoritarian, and likely the work of fake infiltrators setting up a straw man argument.
A lot of feminists are smart and disagree with each other sometimes, feminism isn’t a monolithic thing like conservatism is you see. Feminists HAVE been calling for college rape victims to receive more support, it does not mean that feminists as a group subscribe to policies which are policies of YALE.
You Conservatives, I don’t know where you get off. You come on here saying liberal this, feminist that, and you talk about OTHER people falsely making up their mind about someone – you know why you’re like that – because most of you conservatives are probably rape sympathizers like Todd Akin the “legitimate rape” guy of the Republican Party.
You Conservatives don’t fool me, you get yourself so worked up about these things, why, none of you are going to go to Yale. What do you expect from the college of the Big Brother Bush family.
You’re doing EXACTLY what you’re accusing conservatives of doing. I’m a conservative and I’m not blaming feminists or liberals as a whole for this, but you’re assuming that I am simply because I’m conservative. You don’t see the hypocrisy in your comment? You want feminists and liberals to be respected as individuals, but you won’t afford conservatives the same courtesy. I blame Yale and Yale alone for this huge miscarriage of justice.
There is a simple cure for this problem at Yale. A graduating male student on his last day at Yale needs to file informal complaints against all students, all administrative personnel, and faculty. Given an hour’s work, a marvelous mass mailing could be set up. Sign ’em, file ’em, and file a Title IX discrimination case if they don’t go through the process on an even handed basis. If they don’t include your complaints in their statistics, file a case over that. Bury them in paper.
All those filings can be true on the basis of ‘worry’ as a standard.
Cloward Piven, it’s not just for leftists anymore.
KC Johnson will forever be known as the very first American Academic to challenge what has become known as American hysteria.
KC… legions of young men on college campuses around the nation….owe you a debt of gratitude!!
I thought that Yale had a pretty good law school, maybe I am mistaken. Or maybe they do not care about their own backyard. How can they turn a blind eye to the rights that make up the fabric of our liberties?
“In blunt language, this means that the accused student, Witt in this case, does not have the right within the Yale procedure to cross-examine his accuser. He does not even have the right to present evidence of his innocence. The accusation is accepted at face value, and the purpose of the process is to resolve it in a way that the accusing student feels comfortable. It is on the basis of this sort of complaint, filed under this procedure, that the Rhodes Fellowship decided that it needed to suspend Witt’s candidacy. That’s nothing sort of extraordinary”
That’s nothing SHORT of extraordinary.
Excellent review of a tragic miscarriage of justice as usual in the perverse pursuit of “social justice”, KC Johnson.
Thanks.
The gratuitous slams against “liberalism” above trivialize the article and the problem it reports. I’m as liberal as the day is long (probably more so, it being early November), but the word that comes to my mind after reading this is “outrageous.” Yes, our criminal justice system makes it hard for victims of sexual assault, but Yale’s policy swings waay out in the other direction. While granting an admirable level of support to victims of sexual assault, it denies the accused even the barest minimum of due process. To a liberal, just as to a conservative, this is unacceptable; a balance must be struck, yes, but it doesn’t appear that Yale even tried. This is not a problem of “liberalism,” but one of intellectual laziness. As HL Mencken said, “for every complex problems, there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.” Yale’s approach certainly looks like the outcome of a search for that answer.
While the current campus sexual assault “crisis” and the overarching institutional and governmental response certainly has no basis in or connection to classical Liberalism, it quite clearly has roots in the dominant culture of Western moral relativist liberalism/leftism.
Academia and the left dominated bureaucracies subscribe to a rather monolithic liberal orthodoxy. With the left in control of the White House, DoJ has issued these reprehensibly irresponsible and dangerous guidelines bolstering the most abusive and problematic college discipline systems and strong arming the rest of the nation’s academic institutions to follow suit.
Predictably, the outrage and protest comes almost entirely from the right with tacit approval of overwhelming majorities on the left who either can’t be bothered to comment or eagerly agree with efforts to protect the oppressed victims, due process and presumed innocence be damned.
The simple undeniable reality is that the popular trend among the institutions as well as the encouragement, cooperation, and guidance of the fedgov are coordinated dominant mainstream political initiatives of the left- liberalism (with a lower case ‘l’).
It’s encouraging to hear liberal voices equally disgusted which suggests that you and those other few still have an understanding of the fundament of Liberalism.
The problem is that we don’t have liberals like you in charge of our higher learning institutions. We have liberals who create these processes to achieve their version of the greater good for one specific group of victims.
I wish more liberals thought this was ridiculous, outrageous, and punishable. I wish more of them thought like you.
I agree that he did the right thing, but I think it depends on your point of view. If you look at it from a here-and-now/memories/responsibility point of view, Witt made a great decision in being responsible to the commitment he made to his teammates at the beginning of the season. That said, you could also say that being able to associate yourself with something like a Rhodes Scholarship will put you in very elite company and it is something that from an outsiders perspective will stay with you much longer than playing in one more football game.As with most things in life, it comes down to the question, what is your moral make-up and what are your core beliefs .
Perhaps Mr Witt wasn’t enthusiastic about joining the company of Rhodes Scholars which includes that notorious cad William Jefferson Clint, former-POTUS
This will undoubtedly harm his chances for a good career. I wonder if Yale is susceptible to a lawsuit on this basis. He had a very positive reputation, as far as I know, and this may be disastrous. If these colleges start getting sued by victims of this sort of thing, they might remember due process a bit more.
@ Martin Knight – “This is so disgusting that it makes my head spin. Liberalism truly is a mental disorder.”
No, it is a moral disorder. Rooted in envy, pride, fear and lust, it seeks to remake humanity in its own image. It worships power, especially as expressed in government, and is propelled by the guilty conscience that when violated, instead of dying, becomes a metastatic, cancerous factory of quiet evil, seeking to drag down truth, beauty and goodness to its own level so it will more easily rest with its history of selfish choices. This is why advocating for abortion is so high in its estimation, because there is hidden guilt from committing or abetting abortions. Everything is political, because that is the only place where power can be obtained and exercised without personal accountability for one’s choices. Only intent matters; results are put out of mind. That leads to the culture of death embraced by the Democratic Party, and is also why every funeral of Democratic politicians turns into a political rally (e.g., Paul Wellstone). They have nothing else to say.
Along the way, truth is suppressed and immorality is put in its place. Speech codes and kangaroo courts are two mechanisms. Keeping the party going means stamping out everything that reminds them of an external standard of truth, beauty, goodness and self control. Some do it through art, some through bullhorns, some through more and more deviant sex, and some through adjudication panels. And they get drunk on the toxic home brew of Marxism, which says that my evil is the fault of my environment, not my choices. Instead of repenting before God and being freed from the chains of my own evil, I will change others’ environment so they will be as “free” as I am. Paradoxical, but true. And sad.
Thank you for your article. The New York Times should be ashamed. Of course, it is only a footnote for them and already forgotten.
This is so disgusting that it makes my head spin. Liberalism truly is a mental disorder.
Here’s a question – why do accused students meekly go along with these kangaroo court procedures? They really cannot win either way – so why not go scorched Earth on the entire system?
I’d advise any student being put into this situation to secretly carry a tape recorder (or camera) into every single disciplinary hearing and then put it on YouTube.
I’d advise them to make as huge a stink of the entire situation as they can. I’d advise them to accuse every single student and members of faculty (including the President) in the school of sexual assault.
I’d advise them to also ask their friends (of both genders) to do the same. Overwhelm and attack the College Star Chamber system of justice and get FIRE involved to make sure there is pain going the other way.
That’s the only they’d learn.
I will tell you why there isn’t a push back, there isn’t a hearing, there isn’t any thing to push back against. At the University of Iowa, I was accused of making my classes hostile to women. Proof of this was that I used the word “semen” in my class. I found out about the accusation when I got called in for a reprimand. There was an investigation done, and a report made, without ever talking to me or anyone else in the class other than the accuser. I have never found out who did this investigation. I can’t get a copy of the report. Everything is confidential. There is no one I can go to to make a case. I don’t even know the details of the accusation against me. Everyone I have talked to claims they were not the one who did the investigation, but offers to find out. None ever respond again.
Just for the record, this was a class in hydrometeorology. I start the class with a short discussion of what is new in science. The subject that was so offensive was the discovery of who Jack the Ripper was. A scarf was identified as belonging to one of the victims and was found to have semen residue on it. A combination of good sleuthing and modern DNA testing found the killer. A true CSI-type story. This was a discussion about the science, not a locker room snicker fest. How a discussion of how science solved a murder is somehow hostile to women escapes me.
To all men of Yale:
Do you want to have a future? Don’t even speak to female Yale students.
That could be interpreted as being ‘unwelcoming’, and that is ‘hostile’, which mean ‘aggressive’, a different word for ‘assault’. So not speaking to female students is ‘sexual assault’.
None of which, of course, will make Johnson any less of a liberal or even think of voting for anyone but Obama.
The road to hell is paved with liberal intentions.